One thing leads to another, if you’re lucky. Bear with me; we’re backing into this. I was reading Thomas Vinciguerra’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition feature about the 50th anniversary of “The Girl From Ipanema.” When I saw a reference to “…the 1962 album Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Parker,” I nearly lost my mouthful of coffee.

Parker was nicknamed “Bird,” but the great alto saxophonist died in 1955. The Jazz Samba album seven years later was by the guitarist Charlie Byrd. It featured Getz. “Bird” for “Byrd” and the assumption that Charlie Byrd was Charlie Parker may not be a common error, but there was a time when the WSJ’s fact checkers would have caught it. Fact-checking standards, like so much in journalism, seem to have slipped. But that’s not the point.

I was about to send a corrective comment to the Journal, but discovered on the paper’s website that several other readers had beat me to it. That’s a sign that the paper’s subscribers are hipper than their conservative aura might suggest, but it’s not the point, either. I looked up Thomas Vinciguerra, the author of the “Ipanema” piece, and discovered that, among other accomplishments, he is the editor of Columbia College Today, the magazine of a distinguished New York institution of higher learning. I went to Columbia College Today’s website hoping to learn more about Mr. Vinciguerra. I did not, but I noticed on the contents page under Alumni Profiles was “Armen Donelian, ’72.” That’s the point—serendipity. Track down one piece of information and you might google yourself into something even more interesting.

Jamie Katz’s profile of Donelian includes facts about the pianist’s formative undergraduate years that had escaped my attention, including the one that another prominent jazz pianist was at Columbia with him. Here’s an excerpt:

Donelian also played in a talented lab band in the basement of Dodge Hall, led by the brilliant alto saxophonist and pianist Marc Copland ’70. Sam Morrison ’73 also played in the group; a few years later he was with Miles Davis. Meanwhile, Donelian worked evenings at The King’s Table, a restaurant nestled within John Jay Hall, playing solo piano while the young gentlemen of the College dined in style. Unlike the student cafeteria just steps away, The King’s Table even had tablecloths.

“Armen is a great player and he’s a sweetheart — absolutely one of the good guys in the business,” Copland says today. As students, he remembers, they would improvise sophisticated duets in a two-piano practice room in Dodge. “Once we monkeyed around and played a mock classical duet in the style of Beethoven. We went on for five or 10 minutes and then fell off the piano benches, laughing.”

After graduation, Donelian played with a country rock band and, on Copland’s recommendation, began studying privately with renowned pianist Richie Beirach. “He opened the door to me, combining the harmony of contemporary music — Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky and Berg — with jazz,” Donelian says. In 1975, legendary Latin jazz percussionist and bandleader Mongo Santamaria auditioned Donelian to fill the piano chair once occupied by such world-class players as Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. Though he did not have experience playing Afro-Cuban jazz, Donelian got the gig and was on his way.

To read the entire piece about Donelian, go here. To hear him play, don’t go anywhere. Listen to this from an album of his compositions for solo piano:

Donelian’s website has sound clips and further information about a musician whose acclaim is not in proportion to his talent. The same may be said about his pal Copland.

Carol Sloane sent an alert to yet another step in the abandonment of jazz by public broadcasting in The United States. Here is the headline of a column on the website of The Boston Globe:

The column is by Mark Leccese, an independent ombudsman who keeps an eye on print and broadcast outlets. He laments one veteran jazz host, Eric Jackson, being downgraded and another longtime presence on New England airwaves, Steve Schwartz, being canceled. Then, he asks,

“Is there no air time left for music on public radio?”

That is a question in dozens of broadcast markets across the country. To read Leccese’s column about the situation in Boston, click here.

WGBH is one of the pioneer public radio stations in the US, a developer of programming emulated by broadcasters in all regions of the country. It is disturbing to see this influential station dilute its commitment to jazz presented by knowledgeable professional broadcasters. But WGBH is not alone in that regard. Indeed, it is behind the trend.

The story where I live differs little from that in other regions. A few years ago, Northwest Public Radio had extensive original jazz programming of its own and an array of jazz shows from National Public Radio and Public Media International. After NWPR changed its primary format to classical music and news, the local jazz shows dropped away. Piano Jazz and Jazz Profiles from NPR disappeared, then NWPR deep-sixed Jim Wilke’s Jazz After Hours from PMI. The anemic replacement is syndicated Friday and Saturday night jazz programming with a host who seems to understand or care little about the music, rarely gives information about sidemen, labels or history and makes fundamental factual errors. Clearly, he is under instructions to keep his part short and breezy. There is none of the personal approach of WGBH’s Jackson and Schwarz or of PMI’s Wilke. Except for the host’s announcements—perfunctory, detached—those hours might be filled by a jukebox.

Why do we need hosts, anyway? Isn’t all the jazz you’d ever want to hear available on iTunes and downloads and websites and MP3s and CDs? If we want to know the history of the music, get the flavor of the times in which it was created, learn about the musicians, can’t we do web searches? Why bother with someone who can provide context and understanding, who tells stories, who can become a friend?

Public broadcasting has gone the way of commercial broadcasting, living by ratings. There is little need to point out that public stations rely on statistics to encourage the contributions of foundations, wealthy individuals and “listeners like you.” With their aggressive fund drives, they don’t let us forget, and in the fierce battle to stay alive in a staggering economy, they can’t. Should valuable cultural programming be forced to play by the rules of the competitive market system? If so, then we should not feel justified in wailing when that programming is dumbed down to a low common denominator. In a capitalist economy, there is such a thing as market failure. If the market fails a minority audience that wants quality programming, does the society have an obligation to find a way to provide it? Do we owe that to future generations, or should we hope that the next annoying fund drive raises enough to allow public radio and television to hang on by their fingernails and keep dumbing down?